Citations Needed, Episode 07: BDS & The Moral Narratives of Colonization

In Episode 7 of Citations Needed, we explore how the media discusses the issue of BDS and the broader topic of Palestinian liberation.

What are the stakes? Who are the smear artists? What are the similarities with past apartheid boycotts? We discusses these topics and more using a pro-apartheid 1989 Christian Science Monitor op-ed as our guide.



The Guest

Steven Salaita previously held the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut. Author of six previous books, he is a regular columnist for Electronic Intifada and a member of the Organizing Committee of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).



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Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Josh Kross and Florence Barrau-Adams. Our theme song is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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Citations Needed, News Brief: Charlottesville, The ACLU, and the Moral Limits of 'Free Speech'

In a new Citations Needed News Brief, Adam and I discuss Charlottesville, the ACLU, and the moral limits of 'free speech' with George Ciccariello-Maher, Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University.




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UPDATE:

August 17, 2017 - An op-ed by K-Sue Park in The New York Times entitled, "The A.C.L.U. Need to Rethink Free Speech" addresses this issue nicely. Worth the read.

*****

Citations Needed, Episode 06: The Media’s Default Setting of White Supremacy

(Artwork pictured by @/yesitsalex___)

On Episode 6 of Citations Needed, Adam and I explore how the media both consciously and subconsciously works to smear black victims, protect the police, and works overtime to ameliorate the sensibilities of white media consumers.

The white supremacist regime at work in the media can be broken down into three main narrative devices:

1. The use of language to downplay state violence and assert false parity
2. The uncritical dissemination of exaggerated or made up threats to police to turn the aggressor into the victim
3. The posthumous smearing of black victims to rationalize their killing after the fact.

In this episode, we examine the mechanisms of these genres, how they influence public perception and why they create the media environment that makes more Mike Browns all but certain.

The Guest

Dr. Jared A Ball is a professor of Media, Communications, and Africana Studies at Morgan State University in Maryland. Dr. Ball is a prolific writer, speaker, and multimedia producer at imixwhatilike.org. His commentary can be read everywhere from the Washington Post to The Nation, the Grio to the Root, and beyond. A forthcoming book from Third World Press entitled, Not Our President: New Directions from the Pushed Out, the Others, and the Clear Majority in Trump’s Stolen America, will featured his essay “Agent Orange: Donald Trump as Political Chemical Warfare.”




Here's the episode:




Show Notes for this episode can be found here.

***
Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Josh Kross and Florence Barrau-Adams. Our theme song is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

*****

No, LA Times, That's Not What Nuclear 'Breakout Time' Means

Writing in The Los Angeles Times on Sunday about Donald Trump's threat to effectively pull the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, veteran reporter Doyle McManus noted, "No matter what the president thinks, the facts will get in the way." McManus was referring to the sheer petulance of Trump's pathetically telegraphed plan "to declare Iran in violation of the 2015 agreement to limit its nuclear program" when the next Congressionally-mandated certification date rolls around this coming October.

As such, McManus correctly points out that Donald Trump's approach to the Iran deal demands "Alice-in-Wonderland"-style reality distortion: in spite of its overblown rhetoric, the White House is literally unable to "offer any substantive reason to declare Iran out of compliance with the deal — because there isn’t one."

The periodic recertification is not required by the deal - known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) - itself; rather, it is an empty ritual designed by anti-Iran lawmakers frustrated by the Obama administration's successful multilateral diplomacy. The actual nuclear agreement - agreed to by Iran, Great Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia, the United States, and the European Union, and concretized by the UN Security Council - is not beholden to specific U.S. legislation or presidential reauthorization every three months. In fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is the sole authority empowered to verify Iran's continued compliance with its obligations, namely maintaining a limited stockpile of low-enriched uranium suitable only for research and fueling power plants and ensuring that no fissile material is diverted for military purposes. Since the signing of the JCPOA, according to the IAEA, Iran has consistency fulfilled its obligations.

While McManus is undoubtedly correct that facts don't matter to the reality TV host who sometimes sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office - because he's both unaware of what they are and wouldn't care about them if he did - the LA Times reporter's own grasp of reality regarding Iran's nuclear program unfortunately has limits of its own.

The second paragraph of McManus's column notes, "before the agreement, Tehran was believed to be less than a year from making nuclear weapons that would have threatened Israel and Saudi Arabia."

There are a lot of assumptions in that sentence, all of them false.

To start, McManus gives the deliberate impression that, prior to the signing of the JCPOA in July 2015, Iran was actively attempting to build nuclear bombs with which to threaten its regional adversaries, both of whom are close U.S. partners. This is untrue.

Iran does have a nuclear energy program, monitored and safeguarded by the IAEA. The IAEA has affirmed time and again that Iran has never taken steps to divert nuclear material to military purposes. Furthermore, since the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community and its allies, including Israel, has officially maintained that whatever research relevant to nuclear weaponization Iran may have conducted in the past stopped by 2003 and has never started. The NIE has been consistently reaffirmed ever since (in 2009, 2010, and again in 2011).

Even allegations that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program before 2003 are dubious, and rely on Israeli-linked evidence that is most likely completely fabricated. The authenticity of these accusations has been repeatedly questioned by the IAEA, as well as by the United States itself. U.S. intelligence officials, noted former IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei in his 2011 memoir, Age of Deception, "did not share the supposed [new Israeli] evidence that had led them to confirm the existence of a past Iranian nuclear [weapons] program, other than to refer to the same unverified set of allegations about weaponization studies that had already been discussed with the Agency." And when Israel provided the IAEA with more allegedly incriminating documentation in 2009, no one was fooled. As ElBaradei explains, "The Agency's technical experts, however, raised numerous questions about the documents' authenticity," adding in a footnote, "The accuracy of these accusations has never been verified; however, it is significant that the conclusion of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate were not changed, indicating that they, at least, did not buy the "evidence" put forward by Israel." 

Quite simply, the much-heralded "Iranian nuclear weapons program" simply doesn't exist, and never has.

Thus, the scenario presented by McManus - that, before the deal, Iran was "less than a year from making nuclear weapons" - is false. You can't be year away from finishing something you're not starting in the first place.

The "year away" calculation for what's known as "breakout time," however, is a commonplace canard in reporting on Iran's nuclear program. It relies on the presumption that the Iranian leadership has made a decision to weaponize its nuclear program (there's zero evidence for this) and will at one point kick IAEA inspectors out of the country and embark on full-scale weaponization of enriched uranium to then mount on a ballistic missile headed for Tel Aviv, Riyadh, or Langley, Virginia. The "breakout" scenario seeks to put in time-bound terms the potential threat that a nuclear-armed Iran could theoretically pose. Yet it's all hypothetical.

McManus, like so many others, has misunderstood the U.S. government's own assessment of Iran's capabilities. For years now, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has confirmed that Iran is not building nuclear weapons and that its leadership hasn't given the order to start doing so. Since 2010, the phrase "We do not know whether Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons" has been repeated in each and every annual "Worldwide Threat Assessment" report delivered by the DNI to Congress. Following the implementation of the JCPOA, the assessment has noted, "Iran's implementation of the JCPOA, however, has extended the amount of time Iran would need to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon from a few months to about a year."

All too often, reporters like McManus conflate "the amount of time Iran would need to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon" with the amount of time it would take to field a deliverable nuclear bomb. These are not the same thing.

Former National Security Council advisor Gary Sick explained this exact problem with "breakout" alarmism as nuclear negotiations hit their final stretch in 2015:

Put simply, for purposes of this agreement, "breakout" exists when Iran masses enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) needed for one nuclear device. Note that "breakout" does not mean Iran will have a nuclear device. It is the starting point to build a nuclear device, which most experts agree would require roughly a year for Iran to do–and probably another two or more years to create a device that could be fit into a workable missile warhead. Plus every other country that has ever built a nuclear weapon considered it essential to run a test before actually using their design. There goes bomb No. 1.

So when officials, pundits, and interested parties talk about a one-year breakout time for Iran, what they are really saying is that if Iran decides to break its word and go for a bomb, it will take approximately one year to accumulate 27 kilograms of HEU. The hard part follows.

"In short," as former CIA analyst Paul Pillar has noted, "breakout is a scary fantasy, but no more than that. It is a badly flawed standard for formulating a negotiating position or for evaluating a deal with Iran."

Also missing from McManus' article is any context for Iran's own civilian nuclear program. It is not, as the press would so often have us believe, a nefarious outlier on the world stage. Far from it, in fact.

For over a decade now, it has been acknowledged that, in addition to the nine nuclear weapons states (Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), perhaps "40 countries or more now have the know-how to produce nuclear weapons," according to ElBaradei, though not all of those nations have domestic enrichment capabilities like Iran.

This is simply a matter of science. Nuclear technology and knowhow can inherently be used both for peaceful and military purposes. "[I]f a nation has a developed civilian nuclear infrastructure—which the NPT actually encourages—this implies it has a fairly solid nuclear-weapons capability," nuclear physicist Yousaf Butt has pointed out. "Just like Iran, Argentina, Brazil, and Japan also have a nuclear-weapons capability—they, too, could break out of the NPT and make a nuclear device in short order. Capabilities and intentions cannot be conflated."

This is not news. It's the fundamental reality of dual-use technology like nuclear energy. "Virtually any industrialized nation today has the technical capability to develop nuclear weapons within several years if the decision to do so were made," noted a 1996 report by a former weapons system analyst. "Nations already possessing substantial nuclear technology and arms industries could do so in no more than a year or two."

In 2013, the University of Maryland conducted a study of media coverage on Iran's nuclear program. It found that mainstream reporting is "plagued with error, often decontextualized, and hews strongly to official American and Israeli government narratives." Moreover, the study revealed that, on the rare occasion that the media addresses "Iranian nuclear intentions and capabilities, it did so in a manner that lacked precision, was inconsistent over time, and failed to provide adequate sourcing and context for claims."

When it comes to Iran and its nuclear program, basic facts are misunderstood, then repeated ad nauseam. It is no wonder why the phony threat of a non-existent nuclear weapons-armed Iran has proliferated so thoroughly throughout the media and onto the public.

*****

The Return of the Media's Zombie Narrative About Iran's Nuclear Program

Democracy may die in darkness, but the Washington Post continues to murder truth when it comes to the Iranian nuclear program.

In an August 2, 2017 article about a recent bill, passed nearly unanimously in Congress and begrudgingly signed into law, that pointlessly imposes more sanctions on Russia and two other countries that don't toe the American line, the Washington Post described the measure, in part, as punishment "against North Korea and Iran for those countries' nuclear weapons programs."

(Screenshot via @thekarami)

Not only does this description misunderstand the contents of the bill itself, which actually targets totally legal conventional (read: non-nuclear) weapons and research programs, but it brazenly states as implicit fact that Iran has a "nuclear weapons program."

Similarly, a Washington Post analysis on the merits of pursuing regime change (in wholesale violation of international law or the will of the target's population, which are never mentioned), published just three days earlier on July 31, repeated a number of common tropes about Iran. Not least among these talking points, offered uncritically by two associate professors of political science, is that "[r]egime change in Tehran is thus the surest route to get Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program."

Leaving aside the imperial audacity of such a statement, that the Washington Post would publish this sentence is shocking. Why?

Because Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.

In fact, it never has.

This is neither controversial nor a matter of nuance. It is plain and simple fact. Yet this point continues to be ignored in the service of the undying political and media narrative in this country that Iran is a malevolent, if not genocidal, monster that threatens peace and stability around the world and whose every nefarious move (which is every move, of course) must be opposed and resisted by the noble United States, simultaneously the world's policeman and Good Samaritan.

The Facts

Since the signing of the multilateral nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers in July 2015, the IAEA has routinely confirmed the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program. This assessment has been repeatedly affirmed by the United States government.

But this is nothing new.

International intelligence assessments have consistently affirmed that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, but rather a nuclear energy program with domestic uranium enrichment facilities. All of these facilities are legal and protected under international law; all of Iran's nuclear fissile material is under international safeguards, strictly monitored and routinely inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). No move to divert nuclear material to military or weaponization purposes has ever been detected in the history of the Iranian program.

These facts have been consistently affirmed by U.S., British, Russian, and even Israeli intelligence, as well as the IAEA. In fact, the IAEA itself has said that there is "no concrete proof" Iran's nuclear program "has ever had" a military component.

Despite longstanding Iranian policy that has held, unequivocally, that nuclear weapons are not only strategically and geopolitically obsolete, but also ethically abhorrent and religiously prohibited, hysteria over an imaginary Iranian nuclear weapons program has been exploited for more than than three decades to justify sanctions, threats, assassinations, sabotage, surveillance, and other covert actions against Iran in the hopes of overthrowing the government that came to power after ousting the U.S.-backed Shah in 1979.

Even claims that Iran had a dedicated nuclear weapons program before 2002 or 2003 are dubious at best, and rely on evidence that is most likely completely fabricated. The authenticity of these allegations has been repeatedly questioned by the IAEA, as well as the United States. As former IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei noted in his 2011 memoir, Age of Deception, U.S. intelligence officials "did not share the supposed evidence that had led them to confirm the existence of a past Iranian nuclear [weapons] program, other than to refer to the same unverified set of allegations about weaponization studies that had already been discussed with the Agency."

In fact, even the IAEA's "Final Assessment" of Iran's alleged past weapons work, published in December 2015 fell flat. The agency concluded that "a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device were conducted in Iran prior to the end of 2003 as a coordinated effort, and some activities took place after 2003," and that "these activities did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities." Moreover, the IAEA reaffirmed - as it has for the past decade - that there were "no credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material" from Iran's nuclear energy program at any point ever to a possible parallel military effort.

After reviewing these findings, former weapons inspector Scott Ritter insisted, "There hasn't been a more meaningless conclusion of such an over-hyped issue since the CIA assessed that Iraq had 'dozens of WMD program-related activities' in the aftermath of the invasion and occupation of that country." Ritter even added that the supposed "range of activities relevant" to a nuclear weapon "are far less threatening than the ominous description provided by the IAEA would lead one to believe. In every case, the IAEA was either forced to concede that their information was baseless (allegations concerning the manufacture of "uranium metal," for instance), or else could be explained through 'alternative applications' involving Iranian commercial and military activities unrelated to the Iranian nuclear program."

Professor Dan Joyner, a nonproliferation and international law expert, noted that the IAEA assessment wholly vindicates Iran against allegations that its past activities violated its legal obligations. The IAEA has "now given its opinion that Iran has not violated NPT Article II through any of the alleged PMD activities," Joyner wrote, "because none of the assessed activities can be said to rise to the prohibited level of the manufacture or other acquisition of a nuclear explosive device." Also, because there was never any diversion of nuclear material from peaceful to military uses, the IAEA had effectively "determined that none of these activities constituted a violation of Iran’s safeguards obligations. As Article 1 of Iran's comprehensive safeguards agreement makes explicit, the IAEA's safeguards activities in Iran are implemented 'for the exclusive purpose of verifying that such material is not diverted to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.'"

The Never-Ending Problem

The offending "nuclear weapons program" phrase in the Washington Post's August 2 sanctions article was caught immediately by journalist Arash Karami.

This is more than a matter of sloppy writing or editing, however, as it demonstrates the pervasive nature of a nuclear narrative that holds, despite all evidence, that Iran is, was, and always will be pursuing nuclear bombs with which to threaten American interests and dominance.

Indeed, the Washington Post has a particularly troubling history of pushing this line. Back in December 2011, Patrick B. Pexton, then the Post's ombudsman, challenged the paper's routinely irresponsible and alarmist reporting on Iran's nuclear program, writing that the IAEA "does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it is building one," and warned that such misleading characterizations of such an important issue "can also play into the hands of those who are seeking further confrontation with Iran."

Others in similar roles at leading media organizations - from the New York Times, NPR, and The Guardian - have concurred with Pexton's determination.

Nevertheless, the same damaging language has been used repeatedly by these very same outlets since. Rather than fix their reporting and editorial standards to adhere more closely to the truth, papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times have instead permanently eliminated the position of Ombudsman and Public Editor altogether.

As the U.S. government has again put Iran in its crosshairs, the zombie narratives about Iran's nonexistent nuclear weapons program will continue to be resurrected by the dutiful mainstream media. It remains incumbent on readers to challenge such falsehoods as forcefully as possible before our brains all turn to mush.

*****

UPDATE:

August 6, 2017 - The Washington Post has posted a correction to its August 2 article and removed the word "nuclear" from the originally published sentence:

Kudos to Arash Karami for bringing this to their attention.

Unfortunately, the Post's July 31 article remains uncorrected.

***** ***** *****

Considering political and media propaganda about Iran's nuclear program is continually recycled, I too have reused parts of my own previous writing in this post. I mean, you can only write the same stuff in different ways so many times.

*****

Citations Needed, Episode 05: The Great American Socialist Whitewash

Fred Hampton

On Episode 5 of Citations Needed, Adam and I explore the history of the media erasing socialists of color from the history books and present day discourse––a tactic that serves to both commodity and water-down black radicalism and pawn off leftwing politics as a uniquely white or middle class enterprise.

Our guests this week are Robert Greene II and Roqayah Chamseddine.

Robert Greene II is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of South Carolina. His research covers American intellectual history, the history of the United States South since World War II, and political history since Reconstruction. Mr. Greene has a book chapter coming out as part of the Southern Studies collection Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a U.S. Region, forthcoming from UGA Press, along with essays published by Scalawag, The Nation, Jacobin, Dissent, and Politico. He has also published the essay, “South Carolina and the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement,” in the journal Patterns of Prejudice, and is a blogger and book review editor for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians.

Roqayah Chamseddine is a Lebanese-American writer, published poet, and editor in chief of Wanderings. Magazine. Along with Kumars Salehi, she co-hosts “Delete Your Account,” a weekly podcast covering politics and pop culture. She is a staff writer at Shadowproof, contributing writer at Paste Magazine, and Mondoweiss, and former researcher for Abby Martin’s The Empire Files on TeleSur English.

Here's the episode:





Show Notes for this episode can be found here.

***
Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Josh Kross and Florence Barrau-Adams. Our theme song is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

*****

Citations Needed, Episode 04: The Root of All Evil

A recent New York Times presents a Manichean worldview wherein the United States’ invasion of Iraq was noble and just, while Iran’s relationship with its neighbor is nefarious and dangerous. The article was written by Baghdad bureau chief Tim Arango (picture above, right).

Episode 4 of Citations Needed, my new media criticism podcast co-hosted by Adam Johnson, is out.

This week, we talk about a recent New York Times article — and the broader media habit of painting the United States as benevolent democracy-seeker, while Iran and other Official Enemies™ are presented only ever as cynical imperialists.

In this episode, Adam and I dissect the true history of what caused chaos in Iraq, who’s to blame and what the real motives were behind the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations’ designs for the country. All this in the context of a battle for control over remaining ISIS territory in Syria; and Washington’s, Riyadh’s, and Tel Aviv’s desire to stop the dreaded “Shia crescent.”



Show Notes for this episode can be found here.

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Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Josh Kross and Florence Barrau-Adams. Our theme song is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

*****

MSNBC's Joy Reid Fails History and Geography

MSNBC's Joy Reid

“Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

- James Baldwin

Seemingly apropos of nothing but shameless Red-baiting weirdness, MSNBC host Joy Reid tweeted today about two of Donald Trump's three wives hailing from Eastern European countries.

"Donald Trump married one American (his second wife) and two women from what used to be Soviet Yugoslavia: Ivana-Slovakia, Melania-Slovenia," Reid's tweet read.

There is so much wrong with this statement, beyond the sheer creepy xenophobic signaling oozing every word, it's difficult to know where to start.

First, while Yugoslavia during the Cold War was indeed a communist state, it was not Soviet. Following a brief alliance with the Soviet Union following World War II, Yugoslavia under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito was expelled by Stalin from the Soviet-oriented Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) in 1948 and remained independent of Soviet influence. Yugoslavia was the only communist state in Europe not to join the Warsaw Pact.

History 1. Joy Reid 0.

Second, the socialist state of Yugoslavia was a federation of six separate republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Serbia, which included within its borders the two autonomous provinces Kosovo and Vojvodina.

So, while Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia, Slovakia was not; rather it was part of Czechoslovakia, along with the Czech socialist republic.

Geography 1. Joy Reid 0.

But that's not all. Ivana Trump was born in the Moravian city of Zlín, which was indeed part of Czechoslovakia at the time, but as part of the Czech republic, not the Slovakian one.

Geography 2. Joy Reid 0.

Unsurprisingly, these simple facts were immediately pointed out to Reid by countless people on Twitter.

In her attempt to correct herself, however, Reid wound up doubling down on her error. "Melania is from Slovenia (which plus Slovakia used to be Yugoslavia)," she tweeted.

Again, no. Slovakia was never a part of Yugoslavia. It was the "-slovakia" part of "Czechoslovakia." See how that works?

History 2. Geography 3. Reid 0.

This is not the first time Reid has flubbed European history in service of anti-Russian posturing. Back in September 2016, Reid sent a series of tweets designed to smear the vile Republican presidential candidate's penchant for lauding Russian leader Vladimir Putin by suggesting that she believed Russia was still a communist state.

Needless to say, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Russia may certainly be authoritarian, but it is definitely not communist.

MSNBC, the cable news network home to Reid's weekend show AM Joy, has a history of questionable geography skills. Its graphics department has virtually annexed the West Bank to Israel and claimed Jerusalem as its capital. In 2013, a map showing four upcoming stops on a presidential bus tour of New York and Pennsylvania got the locations of all four cities completely, egregiously wrong. The following year, a map shown during primetime's All In with Chris Hayes inexplicably spelled the word "Iraq" incorrectly.

"Irak"? Really, @allinwithchris graphics person? pic.twitter.com/J3iKuhCrpJ

— Nima Shirazi (@WideAsleepNima) September 4, 2014

But Reid's recent Soviet snafu isn't a mere typo or simply the result of intellectual laziness. It's ignorance couched in the nativism and nationalism of McCarthyite demonization.

Look, Donald Trump is already a loathsome, shitbag sociopath. Efforts to expose, oppose, castigate, and marginalize him and the threat his administration and supporters present to the entire world are vital. His awful wives, past and present, don't deserve any sympathy. But, with all this in mind, there's no need to use base xenophobia and Cold War-era Red Scare tactics to achieve these goals. And it's even more embarrassing to get basic facts wrong while doing it.

A couple years ago, Joy Reid delivered the inaugural Ida B. Wells lecture at Wake Forest University. Wells, the fearless journalist and fierce civil rights and suffrage activist, once noted, "The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press."

As a journalist with an often daily platform on a major news network, Joy Reid needs to do a much better job at educating - both herself and her audience.

*****

Citations Needed, Episode 03: The Rise of Superpredator 2.0

"The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he's a the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal... If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."

- Malcolm X, Audubon Ballroom, December 13, 1964

Episode 3 of the new media criticism podcast, Citations Needed, which I host alongside Adam Johnson is here!

The episode, "The Rise of Superpredator 2.0," is about the media narrative surrounding the rise of so-called “gang raids” that have exploded over the past three years. These high-stakes, headline-grabbing spectacles target, almost exclusively, black and brown people and are carried out by hundreds of local, state, and federal officials.

Citations Needed is produced by Josh Kross and Florence Barrau-Adams. Our theme song is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

Emails obtained by Atlantic City Lab’s George Joseph (now at Demos.org) make clear that media perception is, at least, one major criteria for these raids. Joseph wrote in February:

As one ICE officer excitedly wrote, the operation “has more media interest than I can catalogue and the story was picked up worldwide.”

Another internal email by an ICE official insisted, “the operation has more media interest than I can catalogue and the story was picked up worldwide.”

That which the government frames as a media operation should be dissected as such. In addition, local media is literally copy and pasting ICE press releases when “reporting” on their raids, often lifting 4-5 paragraphs word for word from government-issued copy. Beyond this, who is considered a gang member is based on criteria so loose and wide-ranging, it could be applied virtually to anyone living in certain areas. In this way, those caught up and arrested in these raids are treated much like "enemy combatants" in the so-called War on Terror, guilty by association, ancestry, or geography, able to be exonerated only after being destroyed. Nevertheless, the virtue and necessity of the uptick in “gang raids” is widely accepted without much criticism.

One activist and reporter looking at this trend with a skeptical eye is our guest Josmar Trujillo, who has endless insights on the topic. Josmar is a Harlem-based organizer, writer, trainer, and agitator.

Josmar has organized around education, disaster recovery and policing with groups like the Coalition to End Broken Windows and New Yorkers Against Bratton. His writing has been featured in the Village Voice, New York Daily News, amNY, City Limits, Newsday, Crain’s, Truthout, Huffington Post, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and SchoolBook.

Show Notes for this episode can be found here.

***
Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.


*****

Citations Needed, Episode 02: The North Korea Memory Hole

Episode 2 of the new media criticism podcast, Citations Needed, which I host alongside Adam Johnson is here!

The episode, "The North Korea Memory Hole," tackles forgotten war crimes, broken promises, and the making of an official enemy. It is our first foray into the realm of the Official Enemy™, a staple of United States foreign policy discourse that we'll surely be revisiting a lot.

Citations Needed is produced by Josh Kross and Florence Barrau-Adams. Our theme song is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

The past few months have seen a significant increase in media coverage of North Korea, mainly — if not, exclusively—focused on its nuclear and missile programs. Emblematic of the tone of nearly all reports and commentary is a new cover story in The Atlantic, entitled “How to Deal With North Korea,” written by the magazine’s national correspondent Mark Bowden. In typically alarmist fashion, the piece opens with a horror story:

Thirty minutes. That’s about how long it would take a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched from North Korea to reach Los Angeles. With the powers in Pyongyang working doggedly toward making this possible — building an ICBM and shrinking a nuke to fit on it — analysts now predict that Kim Jong Un will have the capability before Donald Trump completes one four-year term.

This narrative of a maniacally single-minded nuclear menace working tirelessly toward our annihilation is pervasive in the media. It is no wonder then that the American public continues to hold overwhelmingly negative attitudes towards North Korea. Recent polling indicates that four out of five Americans (80%) consider North Korea to be a threat to the security of the United States. Approximately 60% believe North Korea poses a “major” threat, while 37% think of the threat as “immediate.” One survey from May found that a whopping 87% of US voters were either very or somewhat concerned about “the situation in North Korea.”

Polls from this past Spring, even before the most recent ramp up in coverage and political posturing, found that two-thirds of respondents (66%) would favor US action to “stop and search North Korean ships for nuclear materials or arms,” while 43–48% would support “air strikes against military targets and suspected nuclear sites in North Korea.”

This North Korea “crisis” is a knotty one and, to be understood, requires a good primer on a history we aren’t often taught to fully appreciate. For this we turn to — among others — no-bullshit University of Chicago historian and author Bruce Cumings. Definitely check out his book. Many of our figures on early war casualties and recaps of New York Times racism comes from this book — many more details like it.

Another commentator who’s not afraid to buck conventional wisdom is our guest, veteran investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.

Tim was raised in Japan and South Korea and has been covering the intersection of US foreign policy, national security and capitalism for over three-and-a-half decades. Tim is a contributor to The Nation and his work has appeared in many other publications, including Salon, Mother Jones, The Progressive, The Daily Beast and The New York Times. He’s also on Twitter.

Show Notes for this episode can be found here.

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Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.


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Citations Needed, Episode 01: The Charter School Scam

I'm happy to announce the launch of a new media criticism podcast, Citations Needed, hosted by prolific media analyst Adam H. Johnson and... me!

The show, quite simply, will identify, demystify, deconstruct, and generally call bullshit on the media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes, and stereotypes.

For those who might not know, Adam is a contributing writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His writing has been also featured in The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Alternet, and elsewhere. He also crushes on Twitter.

We'll cover issues both foreign and domestic and will often, though not always, feature interviews with knowledgeable and experienced journalists and analysts. I'm confident that it's only a matter of time before the gentlemen of Chapo Trap House will hand over their Patreon account to us on bended knee.

Actually, this is a brand new thing and it's certainly a work in progress. Thankfully, Adam and I are able to rely on the spectacular talents of our producers, Josh Kross and Florence Barrau-Adams, who are not only media veterans and miracle workers, but also quite lovely, generous people.

Citations Needed is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn (here's the RSS feed). You can also check us out on Twitter, Facebook, and Medium, which is where we post a bunch of show notes to accompany each episode.

So, without further adieu, here's the pilot episode of Citations Needed. Enjoy!

Episode 1 features a discussion about charter schools and, basically, why they’re awful. We look into the agenda behind the pro-charter film Waiting for Superman, the ongoing demonization of teachers and their unions, the fudging, inflation and wholesale manufacturing of test scores that demonstrate “success”, and also try to find some silver linings among the dark clouds. For instance, the fact that everyone hates Betsy DeVos is helping. 

We are joined by the incomparable Jennifer Berkshire, journalist, podcaster, and education editor at Alternet.

Jennifer Berkshire’s writing and interviews regularly gain national attention and have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Baffler, Salon, Alternet, Jacobin, The Progressive, Huffington Post and plenty of other places. 

Check out her own podcast, Have You Heard.

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Regime Change Redux: Empowered Hawks Renew Sights on Iran

With Donald Trump now as Commander-in-Chief, there is new life in longtime neoconservative fantasies of engineering regime change in Iran. Anti-Iran hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv have a rejuvenated sense of power and ability to manipulate the know-nothing jackass in the Oval Office to do their bidding.

A rash of commentary penned by the usual suspects and published in the usual hawkish opinion pages of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal makes this clear. In the Journal, Mark Dubowitz of the Likud-aligned, Iran-obsessed, and pathetically-named Foundation for the Defense of Democracies likened Iran to a teetering Soviet Union nearing implosion in an oped titled, "Confront Iran the Reagan Way."

But Dubowitz knows full well that Iran is not comparable in any conceivable way to the Soviet Union. The analogy is a ruse, merely a way to get around to his real argument: that the United States should ramp up its support for exiled Iranian dissident groups, like the Paris-based MEK, in an effort to overthrow the Iranian government and install a new one more suited to take orders from Washington.

Dubowitz has long encouraged military attacks and regime change when it comes to Iran. Writing in the Israeli press back in 2011, Dubowitz argued that "best way" to "end to Iran's nuclear program" was "to work towards changing the regime." The following year, Dubowitz co-wrote a piece for Bloomberg with fellow FDD Iran hawk Reuel Marc Gerecht, which declared that "if we are going to pursue tougher international sanctions against Iran — and we should — the goal should be regime change in Iran, not stopping proliferation. In fact, regime change would make the idea of an Iranian bomb far more tolerable."

The day after Dubowitz's latest regime change push appeared in print, empty vessel Ray Takeyh chimed in with his own coordinated effort in The Washington Post. Takeyh's headline cut right to the chase:

Obviously, this is a canard. And one we've heard before. Last year, Slate offered the possibility of Iran's collapse as a classic clickbait headline on an interview with journalist Laura Secor. (The answer, per Betteridge's Law of Headlines, was predictably "no.")

Any reports of Iran's imminent collapse are obviously greatly exaggerated. Just look at a Los Angeles Times headline from July 1999:

But the new push by the likes of Dubowitz and Takeyh might be a different kind of projection, one that actual might gain traction in the Oval Office.

Indispensable veteran journalist Jim Lobe explains what's behind the recent neocon gambit. The anti-Iran "hawks, encouraged by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s rather offhand statement late last month that Washington favors 'peaceful' regime change in Iran, appear to be trying to influence the internal debate by arguing that this is Trump’s opportunity to be Ronald Reagan," Lobe writes, adding, "Indeed, this comparison is so ahistorical, so ungrounded in anything observable, that it can only be aimed at one person, someone notorious for a lack of curiosity and historical perspective, and a strong attraction to 'fake news' that magnifies his ego and sense of destiny."

The target of this Netanyahu-inspired wishful thinking is obvious. And it's not just that the American president is a dullard who is easily influenced and exploited by those whom he seeks to impress, it's that he is also susceptible to this particular fantasy about the frailty of the Iranian government as it has surfaced before in Trump's own bluster.

Trump has long claimed Iran had reached the eve of destruction before signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the multilateral agreement with six world powers in July 2015 known commonly as the Iran Deal. In May, standing beside Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Trump ludicrously insisted that, had it not been for the nuclear accord, "I think they would have failed, totally failed within six months."

Earlier this year, he made the same dumb argument on Twitter:

Iran was on its last legs and ready to collapse until the U.S. came along and gave it a life-line in the form of the Iran Deal: $150 billion

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017

Of course, Iran was nowhere close to collapse before the deal. The talking point is one pushed by neocons, their paymasters, and their shills in Congress, all of whom despise a powerful, stable, independent, non-compliant nation in the Middle East, one that has positive relations with most of the rest of the world and which can actually defend itself against foreign aggression.

And so, regime change is back on the agenda. And Dubowitz and his FDD cronies know which buttons to press when it comes to exploiting the boundless ignorance of the American president, especially when it comes to Iran. Politico reported just a couple weeks ago that Dubowitz mobilized his regime change propaganda as soon as the new administration moved into White House:

Soon after Trump’s inauguration, FDD’s CEO, Mark Dubowitz, submitted a seven-page Iran policy memo to Trump’s National Security Council. The memo — which was circulated inside the Trump White House and recently obtained by POLITICO — included a discussion of ways to foment popular unrest with the goal of establishing a “free and democratic” Iran. 

“Iran is susceptible to a strategy of coerced democratization because it lacks popular support and relies on fear to sustain its power,” the memo argued. “The very structure of the regime invites instability, crisis and possibly collapse.” 

It maintained that Trump has an instrumental role to play in discrediting the regime. “No one has greater power to mobilize dissent abroad than the American president

The term "coerced democratization" is a tip-off as to the coordinated efforts of anti-Iran hawks. The term has appeared in a number of book-length anti-Iran screeds written by Ray Takeyh, one from 2011 and another from as far back as 2006. Dubowitz's adoption and promotion of the term speaks volumes of the neoconservative alignment currently coalescing on K Street and gunning for Tehran.

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